Uh-oh. Greenland and Antarctica melting faster than expected

Greenland and Antarctica are the two ticking time bombs of sea level rise—no …

The rate of melting by the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica may throw existing projections for sea level rise out the window. Unfortunately for Maldivians and other idyllic, but altitude-challenged islands, the ice sheets are melting faster than anyone expected.

Sea levels have been rising nearly unabated since the late 19th century, but rates have been increasing in recent years. The bulk of the change has been attributed to water expanding due to rising ocean temperatures, while melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica was considered to contribute a relatively small amount. But a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters reports the ice sheets may be contributing to sea level rise at a rate three times that which was previously suspected. The result? Sea levels could reach predicted heights 50 years earlier than experts thought, and total sea level rise may exceed previous estimates.

Ice is primarily lost from the Greenland and Antarctic sheets when it calves into the ocean. When ice sheets move faster toward the ocean, they shuck more ice into the water. And if snowfall over the ice sheets fails to replenish the amount lost, the sheet shrinks in size over time, transferring the water it once held into the ocean.

The new study used two independent approaches to arrive at the result. The first used interferometric synthetic aperture radar, commonly known as IfSAR or InSAR, from three satellites (the European Space Agency's ERS-1 and 2, Canada’s Radarsat-1, and Japan’s ALOS). These satellites can track the speed at which ice sheets move. In conjunction with radio echo sounding to determine depth of the sheet and regional weather models to estimate snowfall, the researchers determined how the amount of ice on Greenland and Antarctica was changing.

The second approach used NASA and the German Space Agency’s GRACE satellite system, which detects small variations in the Earth’s gravitational pull. Two identical GRACE satellites travel in the same orbit and use microwaves to calculate how far apart they are. Fluctuations in the Earth’s gravity, such as those caused by the loss of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, alter distance between the satellites subtly. They can detect shifts between themselves as small as 10 micrometers.

Using these approaches essentially allowed the researchers to verify their results. The researchers compared the same areas over the same periods of time for both ice sheets. The verification test produced results that were within 20 gigatons per year in Greenland and 150 gigatons per year in Antarctica, well under previously observed error estimates for each individual approach.

That both Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than previously suspected—and therefore contributing more to sea level rise than expected—will certainly change estimates of sea level rise over the next century. Both ice sheets were expected to melt due to climate change, but experts anticipated the melting would occur later in the century. Given the pace of their current melting, sea levels may rise more quickly than experts had predicted and will likely overtop current end of the century estimates.

Quickly rising sea levels will give low lying areas less time to prepare. Results from the new study indicate 32cm of sea level rise by 2050, 15cm of which is attributable to the Greenland and Antarctic melting. Though one foot may not sound like much, a FEMA study (PDF) estimated storm surges under such a scenario would cause about 40 to 60 percent more damage than at present. That seems like small potatoes compared to the kinds of problems Bangladesh, the Maldives and many Pacific islands will likely face in just 40 years.

186 Reader Comments

Global warming is a problem we could solve - it's just that people don't like the solution. It's called nuclear power.

Yeah, right. Tell that to the people in Fukushima.

They must not be using the 100% safe kind I keep hearing so much about.

I think GuyClinch is confusing nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

But nuclear power is not completely safe, as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island demonstrate.

Oh, I sure hope not. =)

If he was talking about reactors, I was referring to the enhanced safety features of the Thorium Breeder Reactors IV or the PBMR reactors.

From the wiki:

"The next nuclear plants to be built will likely be Generation III or III+ designs, and a few such are already in operation in Japan. Generation IV reactors would have even greater improvements in safety. These new designs are expected to be passively safe or nearly so, and perhaps even inherently safe (as in the PBMR designs)."

However, once a model is fit to data (aka observations), the data that were used to build it must be set aside. The model is tested on independent data so as not to cheat and then the difference between the model forecasts and the independent observations when the forecasts are valid are noted.

Woops! I must have been thinking Global Warming. Thanks for catching my error.

Here is full definition for climate change:

Climate change is a long-term change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods of time that range from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in the average weather conditions or a change in the distribution of weather events with respect to an average, for example, greater or fewer extreme weather events. Climate change may be limited to a specific region, or may occur across the whole Earth.

Climate change is a long-term change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods of time that range from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in the average weather conditions or a change in the distribution of weather events with respect to an average, for example, greater or fewer extreme weather events. Climate change may be limited to a specific region, or may occur across the whole Earth.

This is incredibly vague and non-specific.

Is there a precise unambiguous definition with no "over periods of time that range from decades to millions of years" and 'may's and 'may be's?

Climate change is a long-term change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods of time that range from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in the average weather conditions or a change in the distribution of weather events with respect to an average, for example, greater or fewer extreme weather events. Climate change may be limited to a specific region, or may occur across the whole Earth.

This is incredibly vague and non-specific.

Is there a precise unambiguous definition with no "over periods of time that range from decades to millions of years" and 'may's and 'may be's?

It was directly off the wiki. If your really interested, I bet you could find a more satisfying definition for yourself.

It would be nice if you at least attempted to support any of these conclusions with some evidence if you want people to take you seriously.

And by "evidence" I take it you mean peer reviewed science exclusively.

That would be nice. Internet sources are not generally considered to be very reliable, and text sources wouldn't be that useful in this medium. But if you were to look on a scientific organization's website like NASA or NOAA, I am sure there are plenty of sources there to cite that would be considered reliable.

"You haven't even addressed the fact that you confuse weather and climate. "

Where did I even type weather? What lead you to that? Not once (I don't think). You made that assumption...thus proving my point again (trying to enunciate something I didn't say). In fact do a search. Weather is not a word I typed.

You just called me lots of things in that last post. Don't worry you can't change my mind by cussing at me. Get a Model that doesn't need to be adjusted to observed temps and does 10+ years of accurate predictions and then we can talk about the legitimacy of them. Until then I am not wrong and my skeptical views of them are valid.

This is the most ludicrous demand regarding climate models I've seen yet. Not a single word about how models are assembled has gotten through to you.

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[You have 7 models and lots of "versions" of those models that have other data entered into them that have YET to produce accurate data FORECASTING without data manipulation (be that of noise or Cloud/Vapor Models added within the recent years).

The fact that you think adding in recent cloud/water vapor models into existing climate models is "manipulation" just highlights the absurdity of your demand. You keep classifying perfectly valid practices as "manipulation" and "constant adjustment." Models are allowed to improve. Just because you have this unreasonable demand that they be frozen at some arbitrary point in their development and never hindcasted during their assembly just shows that you don't know what you're talking about. Why aren't modelers allowed to check the results of their model and make adjustments where necessary before publishing the results of that model? Why aren't they allowed to refine the model after publishing? What exactly is the problem here? Do you think it's dishonest somehow? That the adjustments being made are totally divorced from real-world conditions?

Global warming is a problem we could solve - it's just that people don't like the solution. It's called nuclear power.

Yeah, right. Tell that to the people in Fukushima.

They must not be using the 100% safe kind I keep hearing so much about.

I think GuyClinch is confusing nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

But nuclear power is not completely safe, as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island demonstrate.

Oh, I sure hope not. =)

If he was talking about reactors, I was referring to the enhanced safety features of the Thorium Breeder Reactors IV or the PBMR reactors.

From the wiki:

"The next nuclear plants to be built will likely be Generation III or III+ designs, and a few such are already in operation in Japan. Generation IV reactors would have even greater improvements in safety. These new designs are expected to be passively safe or nearly so, and perhaps even inherently safe (as in the PBMR designs)."

Well it looks like I was mistaken, or at least ignorant of current events. Fukoshima looked like some sort of a play on words with Hiroshima, but as soon as I got home and checked the news I found that it is a Japanese town with a damaged nuclear reactor.

[8:49 a.m. ET, 10:49 p.m. Tokyo] The walls of a concrete building surrounding the reactor container at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant collapsed in an explosion, but the reactor and its containment system were not damaged, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said.

We shall have to wait and see what the fallout (pun intended) of the damaged nuclear reactors in Japan is, but not for long, some sources say that the west coast is 36 hours from radiation exposure if there is a core meltdown.

When did I say they were not allowed..in fact stated that it should....except when you DON'T research the CHANGES TO SEE IF THEY ARE CORRECT and not just pluggin in numbers to fit the observed.

How is that hard for you to understand?

It's "hard for me to understand" because you aren't being specific until somebody backs you into a corner, and even there you're irrational and don't cite anything. How do you expect somebody to check and see if the changes are correct without checking it against the observation data? AnonymouslyRich accidentally gave us an excellent example of this in action when he was trying to argue that climate models were useless without "tuning," he linked to a paper that showed the effects of swapping out two different, widely used data sets (involving clouds and energy flux) within a widely used climate model. Surprise, the difference (though significant) wasn't great, and the models were found to be pretty robust against tuning by using either ERBE or CERES, indicating that we do have a pretty good grasp on things with these models (about the opposite of what he was trying to prove). This was an easy target even, as clouds are one of the biggest uncertainties in climate modeling; using cloud-specific CERES data against the more traditional but less cloud-specific ERBE highlighted the amount of wiggle room there (hint: not a lot). While not perfect, this does show that model parameters are constrained by empirical data. Here's where even AnonymouslyRich has you beat in the science department, though: he went looking for a paper (not peer-reviewed, but still refereed and published in a reputable outlet). He didn't understand the paper and only went looking for something to support his preconceived conclusions (in fact I'm convinced he only read the abstract), but that's still better than you're doing so far.

Now for an example of a climate model that was totallydecoupled from reality, there's always Dr. Roy Spencer's simple box model, the rejection of which from publication seems to have turned him off of peer-review entirely (as explained in his recent book). Whereas Spencer withdrew from the scientific community to take weird pot-shots at them from his blog and his book, everyone else keeps working with people that can check their figures to make sure they're doing sane things in the models. When Spencer stops doing that, shockingly, he makes a model that doesn't represent the real world at all. If you want to criticize scientists for making unrealistic choices in building climate models, waggle your finger at people like Spencer, not the mainstream. The mainstream scientists and modelers are getting it right, in no small part because they look over each others' shoulders and ask for input from other experts.

If it doesn't come form the same group as you take your thoughts from then it isn't "peer reviewed". I linked 2 times to Senate hearings were some IPCC (in 2007) members criticized the models for this VERY thing. You chose not to look at it. Not my fault.

Over 100 people gave their views on model and most didn't agree totally that changing models were wrong but did think the methods they claim to produce accurate results; is usually after data manipulation that fits observed temps. Not only that there was not certifiable way to check that the changes were indeed correct *unless* they stuck with those changes for the next decade (which is hard to do... especially after the addition of 2008 Cloud and Vapor models).

If I gave your specifics where "a" is now "b" and it wasn't documented by the same people were you get your information from (say like Ars, in which you use to support your arguments) then you say I am like a "crackpot" who you can't understand or doesn't make sense.

I linked SEVERAL times to what I believe are creditable testimonies and papers (NASA). You chose not look at them. Read my links to see very specific science details on the areas of manipulation. I am not here to copy and paste (nor summarize) my links. Read and Think. I don't summarize for a reason. I read every one of your links. Did you read any of mine?

If it doesn't come form the same group as you take your thoughts from then it isn't "peer reviewed".

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I linked 2 times to Senate hearings were some IPCC (in 2007) members criticized the models for this VERY thing. You chose not to look at it. Not my fault.

I dismissed it because it came from Inhofe's desk, and it was about science. If you were smart, you'd do likewise. It's not without good reason. This is why I keep suggesting you look for peer-reviewed, actual-fucking-science sources. Until you turn some up, you have nothing to offer me or anybody else that's still checking this thread.

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Not only that there was not certifiable way to check that the changes were indeed correct *unless* they stuck with those changes for the next decade (which is hard to do... especially after the addition of 2008 Cloud and Vapor models).

It's actually NOT hard to do because papers using those models have been published. Believe it or not, you CAN find old shit on the internets (like the previous IPCC report I linked you to) and check to see if they hold up. Once the model is adjusted, any papers published using the old version are not gone and lost forever. For fuck's sake, you can even find Hansen's 20+ year old 1988 climate model paper and see how his projections measured up actual conditions for each scenario (for the interested, Scenario B had the conditions that most closely matched what eventually happened in the real world, and subsequently has very close agreement with the observed temperature record). This "BUH BUH HUH, THEY CHANGED THE MODELS! NOW WE'LL NEVER KNOW!" bullshit is a total non-sense argument. It's worse than nonsense, it's bizarre. You act like there's no such thing as publication.

Also, I would like to point out that your criteria of a single decade of agreement being necessary for verification, or else the model is worthless, is crap. Within a decade you have enough inter-annual variation and noise to make trends statistically insignificant. This is why climate is generally considered on scales of 30 years or more. Yet another thing 4t0mik doesn't understand about climate, but demands we all cave to. For somebody who knows precisely jack about climate science, you sure do make some pretty specific demands and strangely vague criticisms.

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I linked SEVERAL times to what I believe are creditable testimonies and papers (NASA).

No you didn't. You didn't link to ANY fucking papers. You've never even touched a NASA link. There's not even a single hit for "NASA" or "nasa" in your whole post history. Who's doing all the papers/NASA linking here? It's me. Are you forgetting your medication this week? Because you're either crazy or a damn liar. There's not even any reason to respond to you at this point.

You think Han's is accurate. .5 to 5C off? Hardly. Nor do scientists...thus the dismal. I actually addressed it in my previous post by showing it as example of a widely changed, ever changing (not the 1988 version you link to) inacrruate models. Also I never said old versions were hard to find....just FYI only that they are changed what seems like yearly.

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/198 ... n_etal.pdf - Are you F*CKING serious. Accurate? Senario B calls for a 5 degree C change from 1988 till now in almost 30 percent of the regions. Your spitting bullshit now (about means). Compare http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warmin ... s/temp.cfm The best scenario is 2C ON AVERAGE OF THE WHOLE WORLD and that's hardly freaking accurate is it? Even his average mean doesn't address the huge problems of his map data. It's not accurate because his caculations of mean happen to fall below 2C mean of the observed. His model failed regions horribly. You can't use a model that fails entire regions. Get real. That's not a model...that's getting lucky to a *Degree* (how ironic).

In fact I have looked at those links and NONE of them match to the degree even the scientists would call accurate predictions for climate. Just because your model hits and around mean doesn't mean it works. Wow. Think a little more about accurate to regions of all. Thus the VAPOR and CLOUD models (supposedly) were added.

Why would ignore the IPCC members that I linked too? Because their peers at the IPCC didn't right a paper and sign that they agree? Most of the 100+ were IPCC members at one point in their life and *gasp* scientists. Guess that doesn't float your boat.

Listed United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation PDF to support my view that scientists did believe in global cooling. Look at this point I agree we aren't accomplishing much but your not going to impress me with just "mean" averages for models. They have to be accurate to ALL the things they say they will predict....and their not and that means it's not an accurate model (the actual definition of a "model")...representing a WHOLE.

EDIT: Adding: Insure that doesn't mean I think models *can't* predict climate. Don't take my stance on models as a total rejection. I just don't take it as gospel. There has to be HUGE improvements (IMHO) to models to be done and that does take time. During that time I find it very irresponsible to claim certainty of the models to include man is causing warming (especially when those exact models show higher temps and CO2 that occurred before the Industrial Revolution, and not just a *little* higher but lots between 1300 - 1600).

You think Han's is accurate. .5 to 5C off? Hardly. Nor do scientists...thus the dismal.

Actually yeah scientists do think it was pretty accurate, especially when you correct for more modern estimates of CO2 forcings versus the Scenario B conditions (which were run at slightly higher than the best estimate today, but within the mainstream of values even now). I suppose I should be glad that you're at least talking about a real paper (that I linked you to), I just wish you didn't make shit up about it.

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Also I never said old versions were hard to find....just FYI only that they are changed what seems like yearly.

So what? If the old versions aren't hard to find, then you can constantly check the old and new models however you like. NASA projects specifically even have the code open-sourced (Steve McIntyre once submitted a correction, which didn't wind up changing the results significantly) so you can see their guts. Download GEOS-5 for example, it's under NASA's Open Software Agreement.

Now you're moving the goalposts again. This time it's nit-picking about "regions?" From a paper that was published 23 years ago, when computer modeling was necessarily unsophisticated and we had far less data to use in making them? Hansen himself points out the weaknesses in his necessarily simplified model RIGHT THERE IN THE FUCKING PAPER.

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Why would ignore the IPCC members that I linked too? Because their peers at the IPCC didn't right a paper and sign that they agree? Most of the 100+ were IPCC members at one point in their life and *gasp* scientists. Guess that doesn't float your boat.

I'm actually ignoring Inhofe's minority report because it's spin-tacular and, shall we say, more than a little misleading? Inhofe even takes the words of scientists who don't agree with his conclusions to mean that they do agree with his conclusions. It's like asking a Creationist to describe the current state of evolution in biology. Quit linking me to the climate equivalent of Creationists, and you'll be on a start to being taken seriously. For another thing, quit moving goalposts. Quit making non-sense arguments like these:

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You do realize that " there being consensus" is the exactly the reason NOT to trust the science right (for most people looking to discover things)? ...You need not look further than the IPCC Model of the 1940-150s. Almost .5 C off. If you have to ask which model I am talking about....you have proven my point. They have adjusted their presentation of the 1940-1950s every year since 2001 till now to produce observed temps....Even the word "trend" is being redefined to excuse the last 8 years of declining warming in regards to the 2000 - 2002 models.

... etc. Quit telling me how you've linked to papers and NASA when you haven't. Learn the difference between "write" and "right," it's annoying.

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Listed United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation PDF to support my view that scientists did believe in global cooling.

Except it didn't prove your statement about it being a consensus, especially not in the 1980s (20 years after that report was published, and well after whatever "cooling craze" there was in the scientific literature had died down while being soundly thrashed by papers predicting warming). The fact that you couldn't point to any specific parts of it indicates that you weren't even familiar with it, you were just taking your blogger's word when he falsely described it as establishing a consensus that rebutted a study examining an even later period in climate science. In other words, all you did with it was waste our time and bandwidth, not prove a point.

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Look at this point I agree we aren't accomplishing much but your not going to impress me with just "mean" averages for models. They have to be accurate to ALL the things they say they will predict....

This is ridiculous and doesn't even approach a scientist's understanding of climate modeling. You're being completely irrational.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071211101623.htm

It would be helpful if you linked directly to the paper, but at least you're making progress. Seeing so many denialists names on it gives off warning flags, and indeed it seems like they chose older, inaccurate radiosonde data sets which didn't have known corrections applied to it, and that threw their results off significantly. There's also the issue that a contemporaneous study looked at the issue of models and satellite/radiosonde data and concluded that there wasn't such a drastic discrepancy, that the models fell within the uncertainty of the various data sets.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090714124956.htm

This one should have you scared shitless, it indicates that we may have been low-balling climate sensitivity by overlooking some kind of massive feedback. If you thought the IPCC was alarmist, taking this paper into account to criticize them makes that organization seem like ostriches with their head in the sand while a chuckling maniac with a flame thrower (possibly wearing a blood-stained clown suit and a bib portrayed a roasted ostrich) closes in on them with even more powerful climate change than they predicted. If you want to appeal to this paper like you are, you need to accept that the problem is actually much worse than the IPCC's projections. If you don't want to accept that, then why are you citing this? Now realistically speaking, this paper isn't talking about climate models of the sort that the IPCC uses, but instead talking about carbon cycle models and how they insufficiently explain events that happened 55 million years ago. Gavin Schmidt has a useful, nuanced discussion of the paper here. Not only did you cite this paper without understanding it, your allergy to reading actual scientists' words from their own mouths caused you to gloss over significant problems in trying to use the paper.

Really, that's more than enough to demonstrate that you still aren't basing your conclusions on scientific realities but are only fishing for things that seem to support your POV. As if we didn't have enough ample evidence that you don't understand the basics. I should have taken daemonios' advice back on page 3.

" Not only did you cite this paper without understanding it, your allergy to reading actual scientists' words from their own mouths caused you to gloss over significant problems in trying to use the paper. "

You don't think I read it or understand it? Why do you keep saying that. Do you think I can't read? I had a *great* reason to however; if you read the entire thing...you would see I linked two articles that contradict/question one another...from the same models (that do 17 mean average and Cloud Models) two years later. No matter what models they use if its NOT THE LATEST version of the freaking 17-35 models then you cry bloody foul. What you can't ever be wrong..even in the past? Like say 2 years earlier past? Can you not see that's the point I was making. Where will you be for the models of today in 2 years when they don't work? I don't have to wait 100 years based on past history for your (that you trust) models to fail. History shows me about 10 years at MAX before they are thrashed and trashed and if "declared" progress (which is never checked to be correct, aka Cloud Models)....I am quite certain I will see it before 10 years. I bet 2013. Today's models by 2013-2014. I'll be here...will you (I bookmarked you just in case, expect a PM). FYI I am taking TODAY'S latest models.

You didn't follow that? Oh the irony.

But hey at least some terms like "denialists" are coming up. What are you guys like "truthers"? You hold all the keys and intellectual monopoly to this subject because of consensus. Like I said it doesn't mean jack shit. Yes there is consensus that Earth is round *now* (and not always) but there was also consensus not washing your hands didn't hurt when you stuck them in the sick. You see consensus doesn't mean shit. Nothing. In fact if history is a lesson bet against consensus for such MAJOR subject matters (even politics). Let me know if you want a list of were consensus was wrong. I expect I can google a list quite long. Man George Orwell for being a lifetime ahead ( compared to people today) sure did have people like you right.

Yes, because modern science was clearly investigating the issue of hand-washing centuries ago and concluded that it was perfectly safe to do without. Modern science used to support the notion that the Earth was flat. You can't even tell the difference between a scientific consensus and ancient popular thinking.

So by your thought process science can be done by consensus only? If not = not equal to jack shit. Thinking that it can be ....IS INDEED

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ancient popular thinking.

All too easy.

I am not saying it either way....are you? I am only saying consensus has no meaning in the realm of history in the very subject to proclaim have a monopoly in.....SCIENCE! History proves me right...it's not so favorable to you.

I suspect you will learn this very soon with the new inclusion of Cloud Models that are by themselves (*gasp* have no consensus)....now that are added in to the Models. Heck I just gave you an excuse...damn. Oh well I am sure that Model will need 20+ years too. Continue on....Mr Scientist, I won't dare question your authority and observations into common sense.

For an article that proudly titles itself "Ways Science Was Wrong," putting pre-scientific Alchemy at the start is not an auspicious beginning. Putting pre-scientific ideas about falling bodies second is, at best, sloppy. Your usage of this crap to argue that climate change consensus is probably wrong still takes the cake, however. You're also ignoring examples of the consensus being right. I've already given examples of that and how your thinking is wrong back on page 3, so your continued lack of acknowledgment can only be blamed on yourself.

You don't seem to bother with the difference between right/write, were/where, insure/ensure... also you don't seem to know what the word 'enunciate' means... not sure about your reading but your writing could use work.

I would say my ability to type over 100 words a minute does have it's draw backs. Fingers sometimes disagree with the thought process at times. However, I do for the most part type with great accuracy with some few exceptions and weak points. It is an actual thought process for many people who type fast. It's called voice typing in the best terms I can describe, actually forget the technical term (not dictation) and it's quite common for people to use if they type a lot,fast and/or heavy during long periods of times. Your fingers actually type out what it sounds like without the brain even noticing. Don't worry I am improving and thanks for the concern. :-)

Interchangeable among many "authorities" and that's the way I learned it. Do you have something on point to the conversation? Your paper wasn't really on point to what we were discussing about modes/consensus. Just more of a link to show your disagreement with me? If I can't be right (as your link suggests) that doesn't make you right by default. :-)

You folks don't seem to understand the difference of right and wrong with regards to consensus. Science is done by observation first....not consensus. Science also doesn't guarantee an understanding. In fact most science is not understood fully (eg. Cloud Models) Consensus doesn't contribute to the observations nor does it prove them right OR wrong. Therefore, it has nothing to do with anything in science. So stop using the word to defend any science.

You folks don't seem to understand the difference of right and wrong with regards to consensus. Science is done by observation first....not consensus. Science also doesn't guarantee an understanding. In fact most science is not understood fully (eg. Cloud Models) Consensus doesn't contribute to the observations nor does it prove them right OR wrong. Therefore, it has nothing to do with anything in science. So stop using the word to defend any science.

And why should we listen to anything you say about "how science is done"? You've never actually done any science yourself. You've never actually participated in the scientific process at all. That much is clear from your posts and this insistence that scientific consensus is proof of being wrong, or meaningless if not that. And your scoring system is completely stupid. So Newton disrupted the (in modern science terms) unscientific consensus with good science and you count that as 1 point for consensus being wrong and zero points for it being right. This is idiotic. Newton was the one actually doing good science, he broke an uninformed consensus and replaced it with an informed one. Newton built a NEW consensus around better experimental data. So it's not consensus: 0, dissidence: 1. Newton's new classical mechanics consensus has never since been disrupted within the boundary conditions he originally set out (which did not include scenarios where relativity is a major factor).

You can't deny that the entire point of AGW skeptics is to create a NEW consensus. According to you this new consensus would also be meaningless.

Scientific consensus is built through experimental repeatability. New experimental results don't really matter in science until they have been independently verified by many different parties (kind of like a consensus.... whoa! Maybe THAT'S why consensus is such a big deal?) The entire point is to exclude anomalous our unreliable data from consideration when trying to figure out how nature works. Consensus isn't a room full of scientists who vote on what is going to be considered true and what is not. It's a process that happens organically as different scientists repeat each other's experiments or augment our understanding with new ways to test the same things, or revise their understanding based on a better understanding of the equipment or the measurements. It's a complicated messy process, it takes time, and it requires a bunch of people who all think they are smarter than most of their peers to all check each other's work and eventually a neutral basis of understanding which doesn't rely on any one experiment or data point will emerge. Sometimes a strong leader pushes this process, like Newton, Einstein, Bohr, and sometimes there isn't one (as is more often the case in modern times. What's new and undiscovered in science today is usually too complicated or minute for one person to stand up with a dramatically new answer anymore.). It's also worth noting that a messy process like scientific consensus is extremely robust against fraud, conspiracy, bad data, bad analysis, and that is the entire point of it. It's a filter for bad science and it works. While it's true that you don't HAVE to put your trust in scientific consensus, but I guarantee that you do in pretty much every other field of science. The ones that don't have an army of uncredentialed talking heads saying whatever makes them the most money.

I've always lamented that in this country schools spend too much time teaching people the content of science (which they will soon forget) and not enough time teaching them how science actually works and WHY it works. This is much more important to people in their daily lives. You really don't understand how it works and you should remedy that for your sake. It's important. This is just an observation. I'm not even trying to discredit you or your opinions at this point, it's just clear that you don't understand how science functions. The only reason you think you do is because you understand so little about the process that you don't even see the shapeless outlines of all the things that you don't understand about it. Here's a couple nice resources that I found with just a quick Google search. Amazon doubtlessly has many volumes on the topic if you want more.

So you believe that I am incapable of doing science? These types of attacks are quite typical for people and is the human condition to try in discredit someone when they disagree with their findings/views and methods. They attack the person stating that they are incompetent even in fields that are NOT being discussed.

You are no different than those that fought Newton. Science is not about starting a new consensus. It's about finding the truth and perhaps understanding it. Consensus means nothing. Newton didn't fight for a consensus....now did he?

So you believe that I am incapable of doing science? These types of attacks are quite typical for people and is the human condition to try in discredit someone when they disagree with their findings/views and methods. They attack the person stating that they are incompetent even in fields that are NOT being discussed.

You are no different than those that fought Newton. Science is not about starting a new consensus. It's about finding the truth and perhaps understanding it. Consensus means nothing. Newton didn't fight for a consensus....now did he?

And you've been putting words in other people's mouths this whole time. I didn't say that you were incapable of doing science, simply that you don't do science. It's clear from the way you talk about the process that you've never actually participated in it. Never written a grant proposal, never collected and analyzed data and never published a paper or even attended a scientific conference. Plenty of people who haven't done any of these things still understand how science works. You haven't done it, you haven't read about it, you don't know how science works. You can continue to pretend that you do, in the same way that anybody can pretend anything they want. But I'm telling you that it's a poor substitute for reading a fucking book and learning something. Not knowing how science works is fine, most people don't. Continuing to act like you do despite never having worked in research of any sort is childish and stupid. And since you seem to be confused on the issue, how science works IS the field being discussed. You've been discussing it since you first posted in this thread.

If you had ever actually worked in research, you'd know that consensus isn't something that you push for or call votes on or fight over. You publish new experimental data and analysis and if it refutes or sharpens existing knowledge you are publishing with the implicit assumption that your peers will either agree with your analysis or they will refute it with experimental data and analysis of their own. That's the entire point of publishing. You don't build a consensus by lobbying your peers as if they were congressmen. You PUBLISH papers. Other experts READ those papers. The analysis and data in all these papers shapes people's thinking and concepts that stand up to scrutiny remain and those that don't are discarded. Newton's principia was the nucleus of a new scientific consensus on mechanics. A consensus is important because that's how we teach people science. Different universities don't teach different versions of classical mechanics. They all teach the SAME classical mechanics. A classical mechanics which represents the collective work of many scientists who all dissected, refuted, and built upon each other's works over a long period of time through the process of publication and conference talks. Newton didn't send out petitions asking others to endorse his work. He published experimental data and analysis which are irrefutably linked to physical phenomena throughout the observable universe. Other scientists had to accept it because Newton's basic theories explained all the observations. To ignore this fact is to not actually be a scientist. That's how consensus is built.

Those who fought against Newton were those who were willing to ignore empirical evidence. You've not provided any evidence yourself. Just a couple pages back you were bolstering your claims with objectively and demonstrably false information. And then trying, when challenged, to reassert that objectively false information with a post from someone with no expertise in the matter making the most transparently weak argument in favor of your position, and you seemed to think it was some kind of bullet proof analysis. And now you expect others to believe that you have some rigorous scientific expertise? Like we should all suddenly grant carte blanch to someone who wasn't even able to read and understand a single page of text that they had themselves cited as evidence? YOU are the one ignoring the empirical evidence and looking for shortcuts that make you feel smarter than other people, but with out all that distasteful work and reading. Just because reading a few blogs makes you feel smarter than a group of scientists who have devoted most of their lives to the study of the natural world, doesn't mean that you are. If you disagree, feel free to publish an article. It doesn't even have to be in a scientific journal. Your local newspaper even. If you understand climate better than a global collection of well educated and well studied experts from just reading a few blogs, then clearly you must be some kind of peerless savant with an intellect not conceivable by modern science. In which case it should be easy for you. Get one thing published anywhere. Since you have such a strong grasp of whats involved in scientific work, you should be able to give a talk about it at your local university or the next AAAS conference. Much more likely is that you'll probably find out that you don't actually have any idea what you are talking about.